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A phone document scanner that does not brand your pages. Point the camera at a document, and edge detection finds the paper, corrects the perspective, and enhances the contrast; capture as many pages as you need and they save as a single PDF. There is no app download, no sign-up, no page cap, and — the part most free scanners get wrong — no watermark on the output. Everything runs in the browser, so your documents are never uploaded.
To scan a document to PDF without a watermark, open ihatepdf.cv/scan-to-pdf on your phone, point the camera at the page, and let it detect the edges. It straightens the page, cleans up the contrast, and saves every capture as one PDF. There is no app to install, no account, and no watermark on the result. Nothing is uploaded, because the scan is processed on your device.
Checked against each product's own website on 16–17 September 2026. Where a page does not say, the cell reads "Not stated".
| ihatepdf | CamScanner | Adobe Scan | Genius Scan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| App to install | No — runs in your phone browser | Yes — mobile app | Yes — mobile app | Yes — mobile app |
| Where scans are kept | On your device; nothing uploaded | “Documents are safely stored on your mobile devices”; optional upload to Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote or OneDrive | “Stored in your Adobe Document Cloud storage” | Free plan: “Full privacy”; unlimited cloud backup is part of Ultra |
| Watermark on free scans | None | Not stated | Not stated | None — “without any watermark” |
| Searchable text (OCR) | Free | Yes — “recognizes text automatically (OCR)”; which plan is not stated | Not stated | Ultra plan |
| Ads | None | Listed as “Contains Advertising” on the App Store | Not stated | Not stated |
| Price | Free | Free download; Premium Account $9.99/month or $59.99/year (US App Store) | “Completely free to download”; Acrobat Pro is a separate paid trial | Free; Ultra $39.99/year |
Sources: CamScanner on the App Store · CamScanner website · Adobe Scan · Genius Scan pricing
People search for a scanner without a watermark because a branded page is not something you can hand to a university, a landlord or a tax office. This one does not add a mark — not on the first scan, not after a page limit, and not as a prompt to upgrade. There is no paid tier, so there is nothing a watermark could be nudging you towards. What you capture is what you download, and the comparison above shows what each alternative says about its own free version.
Most browser scanners ask you to take a photo and then crop it afterwards, which means discovering after the fact that a corner was cut off. Here the document outline is tracked live in the viewfinder, so you know the page is fully framed before you press the button. Turn on auto-capture and it takes the shot itself once the outline is stable — the practical difference when scanning a stack of receipts or a multi-page contract is large, because you never put the phone down to tap the screen.
A printed contract, a handwritten note, a whiteboard after a meeting and a photograph all need different treatment. Document lifts contrast while keeping colour, which suits most printed pages. B&W converts to greyscale and pushes contrast hard so text goes sharp and paper goes white — the classic scanned look, and the smallest file. Board is tuned for whiteboard and blackboard photos, where the surface is grey and the ink is faint. Photo makes only a gentle correction for pages where the image matters more than the text. Original leaves the capture untouched.
The documents people most need to scan are the ones they should least want to hand to a third party: passports, bank statements, payslips, signed contracts, medical letters. A cloud scanner necessarily sends those images to a server and keeps them at least long enough to process, usually longer. This tool never makes that request. The camera stream, the corner detection, the perspective warp, the contrast pass and the PDF assembly all run inside the browser tab, and closing it leaves nothing behind.
No. Every page you export is clean — on the first scan, after any number of pages, and with no upgrade that removes anything, because nothing is added in the first place. There is no paid tier.
This one. It is free with no account, no page limit, and no watermark on the output. There is no paid tier that unlocks a cleaner export, because the free export is already clean.
No. It runs in your phone browser using the camera directly. Nothing to download, nothing to grant storage permission to, and nothing left on your phone afterwards.
No. Edge detection, perspective correction, enhancement and PDF assembly all happen on your device. The images never travel over the network, which matters for IDs, bank statements, contracts and medical paperwork.
Yes. Keep capturing and each page is added to the stack. You can reorder or delete pages before exporting, then download everything as a single multi-page PDF.
Yes. The edges are tracked live in the viewfinder, so you can see the detected outline before you capture. You can also turn on auto-capture to take the shot as soon as the page is framed and steady, which is much faster for a stack of receipts.
Choose the B&W preset, which converts to greyscale and lifts the contrast so text goes crisp and the paper goes white. The Board preset pushes this further for whiteboard photos, and Document is a gentler version that keeps colour. You can fine-tune brightness and contrast by hand on any preset.
Yes, and this is a good use for an on-device scanner specifically. A receipt or an ID scanned through a cloud app is a copy of your financial or identity data on someone else's server. Here the image is processed and discarded in your own browser.
Yes. Once the four corners of the page are found, the image is warped back to a proper rectangle, so a page shot from an angle comes out looking flat and square rather than trapezoidal.
Yes, using a webcam, though a phone camera is usually much better for documents. On a laptop you can also drop in existing photos instead of capturing live.
More collaborate & share — all free, no upload.
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